In second grade, Fleming discovered a passion for language. She can still remember the day her teacher, Miss Johnson, held up a horn-shaped basket filled with papier-mache pumpkins and asked the class to repeat the word "cornucopia." She said it again and again, tasted the word on my lips, testing it on her ears. That afternoon, she skipped all the way home from school chanting, "Cornucopia! Cornucopia!" From then on, she really began listening to words - to the sounds they made, and the way they were used, and how they made her feel. She longed to put them together in ways that were beautiful, and yet told a story.